Young Black Haired Girl Posing With A Magnetic Tape

Early IBM tape drives were floor-standing drives that used vacuum columns to physically buffer long U-shaped loops of tape. The two tape reels visibly fed tape through the columns, intermittently spinning the reels in rapid, unsynchronized bursts, resulting in visually-striking action. Stock shots of such vacuum-column tape drives in motion were widely used to represent "the computer" in movies and television.
Most modern magnetic tape systems use reels that are much smaller than the 10.5 inch open reels and are fixed inside a cartridge to protect the tape and facilitate handling. Many late 1970s and early 1980s home computers used Compact Cassettes encoded with the Kansas City standard. Modern cartridge formats include LTO, DLT, and DAT/DDC.
Tape remains a viable alternative to disk in some situations due to its lower cost per bit. Though the areal density of tape is lower than for disk drives, the available surface area on a tape is far greater. The highest capacity tape media are generally on the same order as the largest available disk drives (about 3 TB in 2010). Tape has historically offered enough advantage in cost over disk storage to make it a viable product, particularly for backup, where media removability is necessary.
In 2002, Imation received a US$11.9 million grant from the U.S. National Institute of Standards and Technology for research into increasing the data capacity of magnetic tape.